A Little Unsolicited Advice to Facebook

March 24, 2010

So I had an epiphany of sorts today… As I was walking to the gym, I was coming to grips with a challenge that’s been troubling me in business for the last few months. Basically, our company, like many of our clients, is attempting to develop a comprehensive approach to integrating social media with our business blog and website maintenance. The strategy pretty much exists in my mind…

On the one hand we are about to roll out our new website, which we’ve built from a WordPress platform which supports not only blogging but makes the site search-engine-ready. We created a business fan page on Facebook and I’m regularly updating it. Finally, I’ve been tweeting for months now and, yesterday, was at last able to get my Twitter app (Tweetdeck) to feed directly into our Facebook fan page.

This morning, on my way to the gym, I began banging myself over the head over my lack of blog-writing discipline, when a thought occured to me. Facebook should build a blogging platform
directly within the application. Here’s why this would be a good idea:

Businesses, as well as individuals, are already using FB everyday to both market, position and interact with their clients. Blogs are, of course, both a personal and professional means of reaching out and engaging clients or friends.

Social media interactions, it seems to me, fall into three distinct content ranges currently. The first, most transient and sparest in range are the micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter or SMS. The second would be mostly anecdotal or conversational interaction — longer than what SMS or Twitter allows but often spontaneous and unscripted in nature. This would be the sort of interaction which make up the bulk of communication on Facebook currently. The last piece in the Social Media puzzle is blogging, which represents longer-format communication which, often, is more premeditated and planned. Facebook already has a lock on the second “content level” and is the unchallenged place where this sort of communication takes place. With the easy integration of Twitter feeds into Facebook, it also makes integrating microblog content into fan or personal pages a breeze. If Facebook is interested in getting more businesses to advertise and interact on their platform, which it clearly is, why not go the final mile and build in a blogging platform?

This sure would make my life a lot easier, as I could use FB as a pretty complete portal to the outside world for my business. Customers could still visit splatworld.tv when they need detailed information about Splat Productions but, by and large, our FB presence alone would give a pretty complete overview of who we are and what we do. This seems like such an obvious observation on my part that, surely, someone out there must be
working on this…

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